“Those of us who care for the integrity of religious faith have a corresponding duty to resist religion’s power” (Tina Beattie, The New Atheists: The Twilight of Reason and the War on Religion (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2007) p.145).

This is the 1,000th post, and so I decided not to have it be about anything else other than the fact that this is the thousandth post. Thank you for reading! Of the 1,000 so far, which is your favorite?

Saturday Night Live’s version of the debate. If you haven’t seen it yet, enjoy! –><!– HT Shuck & Jive

I wonder how many people outside of New Testament scholarship will remember that there was a book by Morton Smith some decades ago entitled Jesus the Magician. It may get a second look, now that a magical bowl has been found that supposedly refers to him (Jesus, that is, not Morton). In fact, the bowl [...]

Progressive Christians are always looking for songs appropriate for communal worship, songs that do not use turns of phrase that do not really express a progressive Christian outlook. One of the best worship songs I know of this sort is called “I Will Speak Out“. Here are the lyrics: I will speak out for those [...]

This post highlights a couple of less well-known fundamentalist groups which failed to make a major impact, but which may nonetheless be of historical interest. 1. Biblical Antipunctuationism There is no punctuation in either ancient Hebrew or ancient Greek, and thus there is no punctuation in our earliest manuscripts of the Biblical texts. The Biblical [...]

I’ve been reading Keith Ward’s latest book, The Big Questions in Science and Religion (West Conshohocken: Templeton Foundation Press, 2008), with a view to reviewing it on this blog. I’m now reaching the conclusion that the best approach will be to blog about it chapter by chapter, since each chapter deals with such a “big [...]